QUESTION: Paradoxically, your political writings
and your analyses of American imperialist ideology appear to be better
known, in France as well as in the United States, than the new
discipline which you have created: generative grammar. That poses the
question: Do you see a link between your scientific activities -- the
study of language -- and your political activities? For example, in
the methods of analysis?

CHOMSKY: If there is a connection, it is on a rather abstract
level. I don't have access to any unusual methods of analysis, and
what special knowledge I have concerning language has no immediate
bearing on social and political issues. Everything I have written on
these topics could have been written by someone else. There is no very
direct connection between my political activities, writing and others,
and the work bearing on language structure, though in some measure
they perhaps derive from certain common assumptions and attitudes with
regard to basic aspects of human nature. Critical analysis in the
ideological arena seems to me to be a fairly straightforward matter as
compared to an approach that requires a degree of conceptual
abstraction. For the analysis of ideology, which occupies me very
much, a bit of open-mindedness, normal intelligence, and healthy
skepticism will generally suffice.

For example, take the question of the role of the intelligentsia in
a society like ours. This social class, which includes historians and
other scholars, journalists, political commentators, and so on,
undertakes to analyze and present some picture of social reality. By
virtue of their analyses and interpretations, they serve as mediators
between the social facts and the mass of the population: they create
the ideological justification for social practice. Look at the work of
the specialists in contemporary affairs and compare their
interpretation with the events, compare what they say with the world
of fact. You will often find great and fairly systematic divergence.
Then you can take a further step and try to explain these divergences,
taking into account the class position of the intelligentsia.

Such analysis is, I think, of some importance, but the task is not
very difficult, and the problems that arise do not seem to me to pose
much of an intellectual challenge. With a little industry and
application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the
system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the
modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the
intelligentsia. Everybody is capable of doing that. If such analysis
is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social
and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather
than to account for the actual events.

Precisely because of this tendency one must be careful not to give
the impression, which in any event is false, that only intellectuals
equipped with special training are capable of such analytic work. In
fact that is just what the intelligentsia would often like us to
think: they pretend to be engaged in an esoteric enterprise,
inaccessible to simple people. But that's nonsense. The social
sciences generally, and above all the analysis of contemporary
affairs, are quite accessible to anyone who wants to take an interest
in these matters. The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of
these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of
ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from
the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to
organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which
they live without the tutelage of intermediaries. For that reason
alone one should be careful not to link the analysis of social issues
with scientific topics which, for their part, do require special
training and techniques, and thus a special intellectual frame of
reference, before they can be seriously investigated.

In the analysis of social and political issues it is sufficient to
face the facts and to be willing to follow a rational line of
argument. Only Cartesian common sense, which is quite evenly
distributed, is needed ... if by that you understand the willingness
to look at the facts with an open mind, to put simple assumptions to
the test, and to pursue an argument to its conclusion. But beyond that
no special esoteric knowledge is required to explore these "depths,"
which are nonexistent.

QUESTION: In fact I'm thinking of the work which has been able to
reveal the existence of "rules" of ideology, inaccessible to the
consciousness of those caught up in history; for example, the study
which Jean Pierre Faye has devoted to the rise of Nazism. This type of
work shows that the critique of ideology can attain intellectual
profundity.

CHOMSKY: I do not say that it is impossible to create an
intellectually interesting theory dealing with ideology and its social
bases. That's possible, but it isn't necessary in order to understand,
for example, what induces intellectuals often to disguise reality in
the service of external power, or to see how it is done in particular
cases of immediate importance. To be sure, one can treat all of this
as an interesting topic of research. But we must separate two things:

1. Is it possible to present a significant theoretical analysis of
this? Answer: Yes, in principle. And this type of work might attain a
level at which it would require special training, and form, in
principle, part of science.

2. Is such a science necessary to remove the distorting prism
imposed by the intelligentsia on social reality? Answer: No. Ordinary
skepticism and application is sufficient.

Let us take a concrete example: When an event occurs in the world,
the mass media -- television, the newspapers -- look for someone to
explain it. In the United States, at least, they turn to the
professionals in social science, basing themselves on the notion,
which seems superficially reasonable and in some instances is
reasonable within limits, that these experts have a special competence
to explain what is happening. Correspondingly, it is very important
for the professionals to make everyone believe in the existence of an
intellectual frame of reference which they alone possess, so that they
alone have the right to comment on these affairs or are in a position
to do so. This is one of the ways in which the professional
intelligentsia serve a useful and effective function within the
apparatus of social control. You don't ask the man in the street how
to build a bridge, do you? You turn to a professional expert. Very
well, in the same way you should not ask this man in the street: Must
we intervene in Angola? Here one needs professionals -- very carefully
selected, to be sure.

To make all of this more concrete, let me comment in a very
personal way: in my own professional work I have touched on a variety
of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, for
example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this
subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But
I've often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical
linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever
asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these
subjects; the mathematicians couldn't care less. What they want to
know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to
speak, asking whether I have a doctor's degree in mathematics, or
whether I have taken advanced courses in this subject. That would
never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right
or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better
approaches are possible -- the discussion dealt with the subject, not
with my right to discuss it.

But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social
issues or American foreign policy, Vietnam or the Middle East, for
example, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable
venom. I've repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or
asked, what special training do you have that entitles you to speak of
these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are
outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on
such things.

Compare mathematics and the political sciences -- it's quite
striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what
you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about
social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if
you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally
speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual
substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and
the greater is the concern for content. One might even argue that to
deal with substantive issues in the ideological disciplines may be a
dangerous thing, because these disciplines are not simply concerned
with discovering and explaining the facts as they are; rather, they
tend to present these facts and interpret them in a manner that
conforms to certain ideological requirements, and to become dangerous
to established interests if they do not do so.

To complete the picture I should note a striking difference, in my
personal experience at least, between the United States and other
industrial democracies in this regard. Thus I have found over the
years that although I am often asked to comment on international
affairs or social issues by press, radio, and television in Canada,
Western Europe, Japan, Australia, that is very rare in the United
States.

(I exclude here the special pages of the newspapers in which a
range of dissenting view is permitted, even encouraged, but
encapsulated and identified as "full expression of a range of
opinion." I am referring rather to the commentary and analysis that
enters into the mainstream of discussion and interpretation of
contemporary affairs, a crucial difference.)

The contrast was quite dramatic through the period of the Vietnam
war, and remains so today. If this were solely a personal experience,
it would not be of any significance, but I am quite sure it is not.
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the
rigidity of the system of ideological control -- "indoctrination," we
might say -- exercised through the mass media. One of the devices used
to achieve this narrowness of perspective is the reliance on
professional credentials. The universities and academic disciplines
have, in the past, been successful in safeguarding conformist
attitudes and interpretations, so that by and large a reliance on
"professional expertise" will ensure that views and analyses that
depart from orthodoxy will rarely be expressed.

Thus, when I hesitate to try to link my work in linguistics to
analyses of current affairs or of ideology, as many people suggest, it
is for two reasons. In the first place, the connection is in fact
tenuous. Furthermore, I do not want to contribute to the illusion that
these questions require technical understanding, inaccessible without
special training. But I don't want to deny what you say: one can
approach the nature of ideology, the role of ideological control, the
social role of the intelligentsia, etc., in a sophisticated fashion.
But the task which confronts the ordinary citizen concerned with
understanding social reality and removing the masks that disguise it
is not comparable to Jean Pierre Faye's problem in his investigation
of totalitarian language.

QUESTION: In your analyses of ideology you have pointed to a
"curious" fact: At times certain journals practice a policy of
"balance," which consists of presenting contradictory reports or
interpretations side by side. You said, however, that only the
official version, that of the dominant ideology, was retained, even
without proof, while the version of the opposition was rejected in
spite of the evidence presented and the reliability of the sources.

CHOMSKY: Yes, in part because, obviously, privileged status is
accorded to the version that conforms better to the needs of power and
privilege. However, it is important not to overlook the tremendous
imbalance as to how the social reality is presented to the public.

To my knowledge, in the American mass media you cannot find a
single socialist journalist, not a single syndicated political
commentator who is a socialist. From the ideological point of view the
mass media are almost one hundred percent "state capitalist." In a
sense, we have over here the "mirror image" of the Soviet Union, where
all the people who write in Pravda represent the position which
they call "socialism" -- in fact, a certain variety of highly
authoritarian state socialism. Here in the United States there is an
astonishing degree of ideological uniformity for such a complex
country. Not a single socialist voice in the mass media, not even a
timid one; perhaps there are some marginal exceptions, but I cannot
think of any, offhand. Basically, there are two reasons for this.
First, there is the remarkable ideological homogeneity of the American
intelligentsia in general, who rarely depart from one of the variants
of state capitalistic ideology (liberal or conservative), a fact which
itself calls for explanation. The second reason is that the mass media
are capitalist institutions. It is no doubt the same on the board of
directors of General Motors. If no socialist is to be found on it --
what would he be doing there? -- it's not because they haven't been
able to find anyone who is qualified. In a capitalist society the mass
media are capitalist institutions. The fact that these institutions
reflect the ideology of dominant economic interests is hardly
surprising.

That is a crude and elementary fact. What you speak of points to
more subtle phenomena. These, though interesting, must not make one
forget the dominant factors.

It is notable that despite the extensive and well-known record of
government lies during the period of the Vietnam war, the press, with
fair consistency, remained remarkably obedient, and quite willing to
accept the government's assumptions, framework of thinking, and
interpretation of what was happening. Of course, on narrow technical
questions -- is the war succeeding? for example -- the press was
willing to criticize, and there were always honest correspondents in
the field who described what they saw. But I am referring to the
general pattern of interpretation and analysis, and to more general
assumptions about what is right and proper. Furthermore, at times the
press simply concealed easily documented facts -- the bombing of Laos
is a striking case.

But the subservience of the media is illustrated in less blatant
ways as well. Take the peace treaty negotiations, revealed by Hanoi
radio in October 1972, right before the November presidential
elections. When Kissinger appeared on television to say that "peace is
at hand," the press dutifully presented his version of what was
happening, though even a cursory analysis of his comments showed that
he was rejecting the basic principles of the negotiations on every
crucial point, so that further escalation of the American war -- as in
fact took place with the Christmas bombings -- was inevitable. I do
not say this only with the benefit of hindsight. I and
others exerted considerable energy trying to get the national press to
face the obvious facts at the time, and I also wrote an article about
it before the Christmas bombings,1 which in
particular predicted "increased terror bombing of North Vietnam."

Virtually without exception, the press accepted the basic
principles of government propaganda, without questioning them. Here
we're talking about that part of the press which considered itself as
opposed to the war. That's very striking.

The same is often true of passionate critics of the war;
presumably, to a large extent they aren't even conscious of it. That
applies particularly to those who are sometimes considered the
"intellectual élite." There is, in fact, a curious book called The
American Intellectual Elite by C. Kadushin, which presents the
results of an elaborate opinion survey of a group identified as "the
intellectual élite," undertaken in 1970. This book contains a great
deal of information on the group's attitudes toward the war at the
time when opposition to the war was at its peak. The overwhelming
majority considered themselves to be opponents of the war, but in
general for what they called "pragmatic" reasons: they became
convinced at a given moment that the United States could not win at an
acceptable cost. I imagine a study of the "German intellectual élite"
in 1944 would have produced similar results. The study indicates quite
dramatically the remarkable degree of conformity and submission to the
dominant ideology among people who considered themselves informed
critics of government policy.

The consequence of this conformist subservience to those in power,
as Hans Morgenthau correctly termed it, is that, in the United States,
political discourse and debate has often been less diversified even
than in certain Fascist countries, Franco Spain, for example, where
there was lively discussion covering a broad ideological range. Though
the penalties for deviance from official doctrine were incomparably
more severe than here, nevertheless opinion and thinking was not
constrained within such narrow limits, a fact that frequently
occasioned surprise among Spanish intellectuals visiting the United
States during the latter years of the Franco period. Much the same was
true in Fascist Portugal, where there seem to have been significant
Marxist groups in the universities, to mention just one example. The
range and significance of the ideological diversity became apparent
with the fall of the dictatorship, and is also reflected in the
liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies -- a two-way street,
in that case, in that the Portuguese intellectuals were influenced by
the liberation movements, and conversely, I suppose.

In the United States the situation is quite different. As compared
with the other capitalist democracies, the United States is
considerably more rigid and doctrinaire in its political thinking and
analysis. Not only among the intelligentsia, though in this sector the
fact is perhaps most striking. The United States is exceptional also
in that there is no significant pressure for worker participation in
management, let alone real workers' control. These issues are not
alive in the United States, as they are throughout Western Europe. And
the absence of any significant socialist voice or discussion is again
quite a striking feature of the United States, as compared to other
societies of comparable social structure and level of economic
development.

Here one saw some small changes at the end of the sixties; but in
1965 you would have had great difficulty in finding a Marxist
professor, or a socialist, in an economics department at a major
university, for example. State capitalist ideology dominated the
social sciences and every ideological discipline almost entirely. This
conformism was called "the end of ideology." It dominated the
professional fields -- and still largely does -- as well as the mass
media and the journals of opinion. Such a degree of ideological
conformity in a country which does not have a secret police, at least
not much of one, and does not have concentration camps, is quite
remarkable. Here the range of ideological diversity (the kind that
implies lively debate on social issues) for many years has been very
narrow, skewed much more to the right than in other industrial
democracies. This is important. The subtleties to which you alluded
must be considered within this framework.

Some changes did take place at the end of the sixties in the
universities, largely due to the student movement, which demanded and
achieved some broadening of the tolerated range of thinking. The
reactions have been interesting. Now that the pressure of the student
movement has been reduced, there is a substantial effort to
reconstruct the orthodoxy that had been slightly disturbed. And
constantly, in the discussions and the literature dealing with that
period -- often called "the time of troubles" or something of that
sort -- the student left is depicted as a menace threatening freedom
of research and teaching; the student movement is said to have placed
the freedom of the universities in jeopardy by seeking to impose
totalitarian ideological controls. That is how the state capitalist
intellectuals describe the fact that their near-total control of
ideology was very briefly brought into question, as they seek to close
again these slight breaches in the system of thought control, and to
reverse the process through which just a little diversity arose within
the ideological institutions: the totalitarian menace of fascism of
the left! And they really believe this, to such an extent have they
been brainwashed and controlled by their own ideological commitments.
One expects that from the police, but when it comes from the
intellectuals, then that's very striking.

It is certainly true that there were some cases in the American
universities when the actions of the students went beyond the limits
of what is proper and legitimate. Some of the worst
incidents, as we know now, were instigated by government provocateurs,4
though a few, without doubt, represented excesses of the student
movement itself. Those are the incidents on which many commentators
focus their attention when they condemn the student movement.

The major effect of the student movement, however, was quite
different, I believe. It raised a challenge to the subservience of the
universities to the state and other external powers -- although that
challenge has not proven very effective, and this subordination has
remained largely intact -- and it managed to provoke, at times with
some limited success, an opening in the ideological fields, thus
bringing a slightly greater diversity of thought and study and
research. In my opinion, it was this challenge to ideological control,
mounted by the students (most of them liberals), chiefly in the social
sciences, which induced such terror, verging at times on hysteria, in
the reactions of the "intellectual élite." The analytic and
retrospective studies which appear today often seem to me highly
exaggerated and inexact in their account of the events that took place
and their significance. Many intellectuals are seeking to reconstruct
the orthodoxy and the control over thought and inquiry which they had
institutionalized with such success, and which was in fact threatened
-- freedom is always a threat to the commissars.

QUESTION: The student movement was first mobilized against the war
in Vietnam, but did it not quite soon involve other issues?

CHOMSKY: The immediate issue was the Vietnam war, but also the
civil rights movement of the preceding years -- you must remember that
the activists in the vanguard of the civil rights movement in the
South had very often been students, for example, SNCC (Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee), which was a very important and
effective group with a largely black leadership, and supported by many
white students. Furthermore, some of the earlier issues had to do with
opening up the campus to a greater range of thought and to political
activity of diverse tendencies, as in the Berkeley free speech
controversy.

It did not seem to me at the time that the student activists were
really trying to "politicize" the universities. During the period when
the domination of faculty ideologues was not yet at issue, the
universities were highly politicized and made regular and significant
contributions to external powers, especially to the government, its
programs and its policies; this continued to be true during the period
of the student movement, just as it is today. It would be more exact
to say that the student movement, from the beginning, tried to open up
the universities and free them from outside control. To be sure, from
the point of view of those who had subverted the universities and
converted them to a significant extent into instruments of government
policy and official ideology this effort appeared to be an
illegitimate form of "politicization." All of this seems obvious as
regards university laboratories devoted to weapons production or
social science programs with intimate connections to
counterinsurgency, government intelligence services and propaganda,
and social control. It is less obvious, perhaps, but nevertheless
true, I think, in the domain of academic scholarship.

The "revisionist" alternative was developed in various conflicting
versions by James Warburg, D. F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams,
Gar Alperovitz, Gabriel Kolko, David Horowitz, Diane Clemens, and
others. They argued that the cold war resulted from an interaction of
great power designs and suspicions. This position not only has prima
facie plausibility, but also receives strong support from the
historical and documentary record. But few people paid much attention
to "revisionist" studies, which were often the object of scorn or a
few pleasantries among "serious" analysts.

By the end of the sixties, however, it had become impossible to
prevent serious consideration of the "revisionist" position, in large
part because of the pressures of the student movement. Students had
read these books and wanted to have them discussed. What resulted is
quite interesting.

In the first place, as soon as the revisionist alternative was
seriously considered, the orthodox position simply dissolved,
vanished. As soon as the debate was opened, it found itself lacking an
object, virtually. The orthodox position was abandoned.

To be sure, orthodox historians rarely admitted that they had been
in error. Instead, while adopting some of the revisionist views, they
attributed to the revisionists a stupid position, according to which
-- to take a not untypical characterization -- "the Soviet Government
... was merely the hapless object of our vicious diplomacy." This is
Herbert Feis's rendition of the position of Gar Alperovitz, whose
actual view was that "the Cold War cannot be understood simply as an
American response to a Soviet challenge, but rather as the insidious
interaction of mutual suspicions, blame for which must be shared by
all." Quite typically, the view attributed to the revisionists was a
nonsensical one that takes no account of interaction of the
superpowers. Orthodox historians took over some elements of the
revisionist analysis, while attributing to them an idiotic doctrine
that was fundamentally different from what had actually been proposed,
and in fact was the mirror image of the original orthodox position.
The motivation for this mode of argument is of course obvious enough.

Starting from this slightly revised basis, many orthodox historians
have sought to reconstruct the image of American benevolence and
passivity. But I do not want to go into this development here. As for
the impact of the revisionist analysis, Galbraith again provides an
interesting example: I have already quoted his book, which appeared in
1967. In a revised edition, in 1971, he replaced the word "the" by the
word "an" in the passage quoted: "the revolutionary and national
aspirations of the Soviets, and more recently of the Chinese, and the
compulsive vigor of their assertion, were an undoubted
historical source [of the cold war] (my emphasis). This account is
still misleading and biased, because he does not speak of the other
causes; it would also be interesting to see in just what way the
initiatives of China were "an undoubted source" of the cold war. But
the position is at least tenable, in contrast to the orthodox
position, which he gave in the previous edition four years earlier --
and prior to the general impact of the student movement on the
universities.

Galbraith is an interesting example just because he is one of the
most open, critical, and questioning minds among the liberal
intelligentsia. His comments on the cold war and its origins are also
interesting because they are presented as a casual side remark: he
does not attempt in this context to give an original historical
analysis, but merely reports in passing the doctrine accepted among
those liberal intellectuals who were somewhat skeptical and critical.
We are not talking here about an Arthur Schlesinger or other
ideologues who at times present a selection of historical facts in a
manner comparable to the party historians of other faiths.

One can understand why so many liberal intellectuals were terrified
at the end of the sixties, why they describe this period as one of
totalitarianism of the left: for once they were compelled to look the
world of facts in the face. A serious threat, and a real danger for
people whose role is ideological control. There is a recent and quite
interesting study put out by the Trilateral Commission -- The
Crisis of Democracy, by Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and
Joji Watanuki -- in which an international group of scholars and
others discuss what they see as contemporary threats to democracy. One
of these threats is posed by "value-oriented intellectuals" who, as
they correctly point out, often challenge the institutions that are
responsible for "the indoctrination of the young" -- an apt phrase.
The student movement contributed materially to this aspect of "the
crisis of democracy."

By the late sixties the discussion had gone beyond the question of
Vietnam or the interpretation of contemporary history; it concerned
the institutions themselves. Orthodox economics was very
briefly challenged by students who wanted to undertake a fundamental
critique of the functioning of the capitalist economy; students
questioned the institutions, they wanted to study Marx and political
economy.

Perhaps I can illustrate this once again with a personal anecdote:
In the spring of 1969 a small group of students in economics here in
Cambridge wanted to initiate a discussion of the nature of economics
as a field of study. In order to open this discussion, they tried to
organize a debate in which the two main speakers would be Paul
Samuelson, the eminent Keynesian economist at MIT (today a Nobel
laureate), and a Marxist economist. But for this latter role they were
not able to find anyone in the Boston area, no one who was willing to
question the neo-classical position from the point of view of Marxist
political economy. Finally I was asked to take on the task, though I
have no particular knowledge of economics, and no commitment to
Marxism. Not one professional, or even semi-professional, in 1969! And
Cambridge is a very lively place in these respects. That may give you
some idea of the prevailing intellectual climate. It is difficult to
imagine anything comparable in Western Europe or Japan.

The student movement changed these things to a small extent: what
was described, as I told you, as terror at the university ... the SS
marching through the corridors ... the academic intelligentsia barely
survived these terrifying attacks by student radicals ... of course,
due solely to their great courage. Unbelievable fantasies! Although,
to be sure, there were incidents, sometimes instigated by provocateurs
of the FBI, as we know now, which stimulated that paranoid
interpretation. What a devastating thing, to have opened up the
university just a little! But the mass media were hardly touched at
all, and now orthodoxy has been reestablished, because the pressure is
no longer there. For example, a serious diplomatic historian like
Gaddis Smith can now describe Williams and Kolko as "pamphleteers" in
the New York Times Book Review.

QUESTION: To what do you attribute this "falling off" of the
pressure?

CHOMSKY: To many things. When the New Left developed within the
student movement in the United States, it could not associate itself
with any broader social movement, rooted in any important segment of
the population. In large part this was the result of the ideological
narrowness of the preceding period. Students form a social group that
is marginal and transitory. The student left constituted a small
minority, often confronted by very difficult circumstances. A living
intellectual tradition of the left did not exist, nor a socialist
movement with a base in the working class. There was no living
tradition or popular movement from which they could gain support.
Under these circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that the student
movement lasted as long as it did.

QUESTION: And the new generation?

CHOMSKY: It is faced with new forms of experience. Students today
seem to find it easier to adapt to the demands imposed from the
outside, though one should not exaggerate; in my experience at least,
colleges are quite unlike the fifties and early sixties. The economic
stagnation and recession have a lot to do with student attitudes.
Under the conditions of the sixties, students could suppose that they
would find means of subsistence, no matter what they did. The society
seemed to have sufficient interstices, there was a sense of
expansiveness and optimism, so that one could hope to find a place
somehow. Now that is no longer the case. Even those who are
"disciplined" and well prepared professionally may become
well-educated taxi drivers. Student activism has felt the effect of
all this.

Other factors have also played a role. There is evidence that
certain universities, perhaps many of them, have explicitly sought to
exclude leftist students. Even in liberal universities, political
criteria have been imposed to exclude students who might "cause
problems." Not entirely, of course, otherwise they would have excluded
all the good students. Leftist students also have had serious
difficulties in working at the universities, or later, in gaining
appointments, at least in the ideological disciplines, political
science, economics, Asian studies, for example.

QUESTION: At the time of the French publication of your book
Counterrevolutionary Violence (Bains de Sang) there was
much talk in France about the fact that the English original had been
censored (that is, distribution was blocked) by the conglomerate to
which the publishing house belonged; the publishing house itself was
closed and its personnel dismissed. The chief editor became a taxi
driver and now is organizing a taxi-drivers' union. French television
has cast doubt on this story.

CHOMSKY: That "censorship" by the conglomerate did take place, as
you describe, but it was a stupid act on their part. At that level
censorship isn't necessary, given the number of potential readers on
the one hand, and on the other, the weight exerted by the enormous
ideological apparatus. I have often thought that if a rational Fascist
dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
State censorship is not necessary, or even very efficient, in
comparison to the ideological controls exercised by systems that are
more complex and more decentralized.

QUESTION: Within this framework, how do you interpret the Watergate
affair, which has often been presented in France as the "triumph" of
democracy?

CHOMSKY: To consider the Watergate affair as a triumph of democracy
is an error, in my opinion. The real question raised was not: Did
Nixon employ evil methods against his political adversaries? but
rather: Who were the victims? The answer is clear. Nixon was
condemned, not because he employed reprehensible methods in his
political struggles, but because he made a mistake in the choice of
adversaries against whom he turned these methods. He attacked people
with power.

The telephone taps? Such practices have existed for a long time. He
had an "enemies list"? But nothing happened to those who were on that
list. I was on that list, nothing happened to me. No, he simply made a
mistake in his choice of enemies: he had on his list the chairman of
IBM, senior government advisers, distinguished pundits of the press,
highly placed supporters of the Democratic Party. He attacked the
Washington Post, a major capitalist enterprise. And these powerful
people defended themselves at once, as would be expected. Watergate?
Men of power against men of power.

Similar crimes, and others much graver, could have been charged
against other people as well as Nixon. But those crimes were typically
directed against minorities or against movements of social change, and
few ever protested. The ideological censorship kept these matters from
the public eye during the Watergate period, although remarkable
documentation concerning this repression appeared at just this time.
It was only when the dust of Watergate had settled that the press and
the political commentators turned toward some of the real and profound
cases of abuse of state power -- still without recognizing or
exploring the gravity of the issue.

For example, the Church Committee has published information, the
significance of which has not really been made clear. At the time of
its revelations, a great deal of publicity was focused on the Martin
Luther King affair, but still more important revelations have hardly
been dealt with by the press to this day (January 1976). For example,
the following: In Chicago there was a street gang called the
Blackstone Rangers, which operated in the ghetto. The Black Panthers
were in contact with them, attempting to politicize them, it appears.
As long as the Rangers remained a ghetto street gang -- a criminal
gang, as depicted by the FBI, at least -- the FBI were not much
concerned; this was also a way of controlling the ghetto. But
radicalized into a political group, they became potentially dangerous.

The basic function of the FBI is not to stop crime. Rather, it
functions as a political police, in large measure. An indication is
given by the FBI budget and the way it is apportioned. Some suggestive
information on this subject has been revealed by a group calling
themselves the "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI" who
succeeded in stealing from the FBI's Media, Pennsylvania, office a
collection of documents which they attempted to circulate to the
press. The breakdown of these documents was approximately the
following: 30 percent were devoted to routine procedures; 40 percent
to political surveillance involving two right-wing groups, ten groups
concerned with immigrants, and more than two hundred liberal or
left-wing groups; 14 percent to AWOLs and deserters; 1 percent to
organized crime -- mostly gambling -- and the rest to rape, bank
robbery, murder, etc.

Faced with the potential alliance of the Rangers and the Black
Panthers, the FBI decided to take action, in line with the national
program of dismantling the left in which it was engaged, the national
Counter-Intelligence Program known as Cointelpro. They sought to
incite conflict between the two groups by means of a forgery, an
anonymous letter sent to the leader of the Rangers by someone who
identified himself as "a black brother." This letter warned of a
Panther plot to assassinate the leader of the Rangers. Its transparent
purpose was to incite the Rangers -- described in FBI documents as a
group "to whom violent type activity, shooting, and the like, are
second nature" -- to respond with violence to the fictitious
assassination plot.

But it didn't work, perhaps because at that time the relations
between the Rangers and the Panthers were already too close. The FBI
had to take on the task of destroying the Panthers itself. How?

Though there has been no systematic investigation, we can
reconstruct what seems to be a plausible story: A few months later, in
December 1969, the Chicago police conducted a pre-dawn raid on a
Panther apartment. Approximately one hundred shots were fired. At
first the police claimed that they had responded to the fire of the
Panthers, but it was quickly established by the local press that this
was false. Fred Hampton, one of the most talented and promising
leaders of the Panthers, was killed in his bed. There is evidence that
he may have been drugged. Witnesses claim that he was murdered in cold
blood. Mark Clark was also killed. This event can fairly be described
as a Gestapo-style political assassination. At the time it was thought
that the Chicago police were behind the raid. That would have been bad
enough, but the facts revealed since suggest something more sinister.
We know today that Hampton's personal bodyguard, William O'Neal, who
was also chief of Panther security, was an FBI infiltrator. A few days
before the raid, the FBI office turned over to the Chicago police a
floor plan of the Panther apartment supplied by O'Neal, with the
location of the beds marked, along with a rather dubious report by
O'Neal that illegal weapons were kept in the apartment: the pretext
for the raid. Perhaps the floor plan explains the fact, noticed by
reporters, that the police gunfire was directed to inside corners of
the apartment rather than the entrances. It certainly undermines still
further the original pretense that the police were firing in response
to Panther gunshots, confused by unfamiliar surroundings. The Chicago
press has reported that the FBI agent to whom O'Neal reported was the
head of Chicago Cointelpro directed against the Black Panthers and
other black groups. Whether or not this is true, there is direct
evidence of FBI complicity in the murders.

Putting this information together with the documented effort of the
FBI to incite violence and gang warfare a few months earlier, it seems
not unreasonable to speculate that the FBI undertook on its own
initiative the murder that it could not elicit from the
"violence-prone" group to which it had addressed a fabricated letter
implicating the Panthers in an assassination attempt against its
leader.

This one incident (which, incidentally, was not seriously
investigated by the Church Committee) completely overshadows the
entire Watergate episode in significance by a substantial margin. But
with a few exceptions the national press or television have had little
to say on the subject, though it has been well covered locally in
Chicago. The matter has rarely been dealt with by political
commentators. The comparison with coverage of such "atrocities" as
Nixon's "enemies list" or tax trickery is quite striking. For example,
during the entire Watergate period, the New Republic, which was
then virtually the official organ of American liberalism, found no
occasion to report or comment on these matters, although the basic
facts and documents had become known.

The family of Fred Hampton brought a civil suit against the Chicago
police, but up to the present the FBI involvement has been excluded
from the courts, although much relevant information is available in
depositions made under oath. If people offended by "Watergate horrors"
were really concerned with civil and human rights, they should have
pursued the information released by the Church Committee with regard
to the affair of the Blackstone Rangers, and considered the possible
relevance of this information to what is known concerning FBI
involvement in the murder of Fred Hampton by the Chicago police. At
least a serious inquiry should have been initiated to examine what
seem to be possible connections, and to bring to light the FBI role
under Nixon and his predecessors. For what was at issue here was an
assassination in which the national political police may have been
implicated, a crime that far transcends anything attributed to Nixon
in the Watergate investigations. I should recall that the Watergate
inquiry did touch on one issue of extraordinary importance, the
bombing of Cambodia, but only on very narrow grounds -- it was the
alleged "secrecy" of the bombings, not the fact itself, that was
charged to Nixon as his "crime" in this regard.

There are other cases of this kind. For example, in San Diego the
FBI apparently financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing
group of former Minute Men, transforming it into something called the
Secret Army Organization specializing in terrorist acts of various
kinds. I heard of this first from one of my former students, who was
the target of an assassination attempt by the organization. In fact,
he is the student who had organized the debate on economics that I
told you about a little while ago, when he was still a student at MIT.
Now he was teaching at San Diego State College and was engaged in
political activities -- which incidentally were completely nonviolent,
not that this is relevant.

The head of the Secret Army Organization -- a provocateur in the
pay of the FBI -- drove past his house, and his companion fired shots
into it, seriously wounding a young woman. The young man who was their
target was not at home at the time. The weapon had been stolen by this
FBI provocateur. According to the local branch of the ACLU, the gun
was handed over the next day to the San Diego FBI Bureau, who hid it;
and for six months the FBI lied to the San Diego police about the
incident. This affair did not become publicly known until later.

This terrorist group, directed and financed by the FBI, was finally
broken up by the San Diego police, after they had tried to fire-bomb a
theater in the presence of police. The FBI agent in question, who had
hidden the weapon, was transferred outside the state of California so
that he could not be prosecuted. The FBI provocateur also escaped
prosecution, though several members of the secret terrorist
organization were prosecuted. The FBI was engaged in efforts to incite
gang warfare among black groups in San Diego, as in Chicago, at about
the same time. In secret documents, the FBI took credit for inciting
shootings, beatings, and unrest in the ghetto, a fact that has
elicited very little comment in the press or journals of opinion.

This same young man, incidentally, was harassed in other ways. It
appears that the FBI continued to subject him to various kinds of
intimidation and threats, by means of provocateurs. Furthermore,
according to his ACLU attorneys, the FBI supplied information to the
college where he was teaching that was the basis for misconduct
charges filed against him. He faced three successive inquiries at the
college, and each time was absolved of the charges brought against
him. At that point the chancellor of the California state college
system, Glenn Dumke, stated that he would not accept the findings of
the independent hearing committees and simply dismissed him from his
position. Notice that such incidents, of which there have been a fair
number, are not regarded as "totalitarianism" in the university.

The basic facts were submitted to the Church Committee by the ACLU
in June 1975 and also offered to the press. As far as I know, the
committee did not conduct any investigation into the matter. The
national press said virtually nothing about these incidents at the
time, and very little since. There have been similar reports
concerning other government programs of repression. For example, Army
Intelligence has been reported to have engaged in illegal actions in
Chicago. In Seattle, fairly extensive efforts were undertaken to
disrupt and discredit local left-wing groups. The FBI ordered one of
its agents to induce a group of young radicals to blow up a bridge;
this was to be done in such a manner that the person who was to plant
the bomb would also be blown up with it. The agent refused to carry
out these instructions. Instead, he talked to the press and finally
testified in court. That is how the matter became known. In Seattle,
FBI infiltrators were inciting arson, terrorism, and bombing, and in
one case entrapped a young black man in a robbery attempt, which they
initiated and in the course of which he was killed. This was reported
by Frank Donner in the Nation, one of the few American journals
to have attempted some serious coverage of such matters.

There is a good deal more of this. But all these isolated cases
only take on their full meaning if you put them into the context of
the policies of the FBI since its origins during the post-World War I
Red scare, which I will not try to review here. The Cointelpro
operations began in the 1950s, with a program to disrupt and destroy
the Communist Party. Although this was not officially proclaimed,
everybody knew something of the sort was going on, and there were very
few protests; it was considered quite legitimate. People even joked
about it.

In 1960, the disruption program was extended to the Puerto Rican
independence movement. In October 1961, under the administration of
Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, the FBI initiated a disruption
program against the Socialist Workers Party (the largest Trotskyist
organization); the program was later extended to the civil rights
movement, the Ku Klux Klan, black nationalist groups, and the peace
movement in general; by 1968, it covered the entire "New Left."

The rationale given internally for these illegal programs is quite
revealing. The program for disrupting the Socialist Workers Party,
which came directly from the central office of the FBI, presented its
rationale in essentially these terms:

We launch this program for the following reasons:

(1) the Socialist Workers Party is openly running candidates in
local elections throughout the country;

(2) it supports integration in the South;

(3) it supports Castro.

What does this actually indicate? It means that SWP political
initiative in running candidates in elections -- legal political
activity -- their work in support of civil rights, and their efforts
to change U.S. foreign policy justify their destruction at the hands
of the national political police.

This is the rationale behind these programs of government
repression: they were directed against civil rights activities and
against legal political action that ran counter to the prevailing
consensus. In comparison with Cointelpro and related government
actions in the 1960s, Watergate was a tea party. It is instructive,
however, to compare the relative attention accorded to them in the
press. This comparison reveals clearly and dramatically that it was
the improper choice of targets, not improper acts, that led to Nixon's
downfall. The alleged concern for civil and democratic rights was a
sham. There was no "triumph of democracy."

QUESTION: It appears that a proposal, containing passages from the
Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, was
distributed in the streets at one time and people refused to sign
them, believing them to be left-wing propaganda.

CHOMSKY: Such incidents have been reported from the 1950s, if I
recall. People have been intimidated for many years. Liberals would
like to believe that all of this is due to a few evil men: Joe
McCarthy and Richard Nixon. That is quite false. One can trace the
postwar repression to security measures initiated by Truman in 1947,
and efforts by Democratic liberals to discredit Henry Wallace and his
supporters at that time. It was the liberal senator Hubert Humphrey
who proposed detention camps in case of a "national emergency." He did
finally vote against the McCarran Act, but said at the time that he
found it not sufficiently harsh in some respects; he was opposed to
the provision that prisoners in the detention camps should be
protected by the right of habeas corpus: that was not the way to treat
Communist conspirators! The Communist Control Act introduced by
leading liberals a few years later was so patently unconstitutional
that no one actually tried to enforce it, to my knowledge. This law,
incidentally, was specifically directed in part against trade unions.
And together with these senators, many liberal intellectuals
implicitly supported the fundamental aims of "McCarthyism," though
they objected to his methods -- particularly when they too became
targets. They carried out what amounted to a partial "purge" in the
universities, and in many ways developed the ideological framework for
ridding American society of this "cancer" of serious dissent. These
are among the reasons for the remarkable conformism and ideological
narrowness of intellectual life in the United States, and for the
isolation of the student movement that we discussed earlier.

If these liberals opposed McCarthy, it was because he went too far,
and in the wrong way. He attacked the liberal intelligentsia
themselves, or mainstream political figures like George Marshall,
instead of confining himself to the "Communist enemy." Like Nixon, he
made a mistake in choosing his enemies when he began to attack the
Church and the Army. Commonly, if liberal intellectuals criticized
him, it was on the grounds that his methods were not the right ones
for ridding the country of real communists. There were some notable
exceptions, but depressingly few.

Similarly, Justice Robert Jackson, one of the leading liberals on
the Supreme Court, opposed the doctrine of "clear and present danger"
(according to which freedom of speech could be abridged in cases
affecting the security of the state) when applied to Communist
activities, because it was not harsh enough. If you wait until the
danger becomes "clear and present," he explained, it will be too late.
You must stop Communists before their "imminent actions." Thus he
supported a truly totalitarian point of view: We must not permit this
kind of discussion to begin.

But these liberals were very shocked when McCarthy turned his
weapons against them. He was no longer playing according to the rules
of the game -- the game that they invented.

QUESTION: Similarly, I've noticed that the scandal involving the
CIA did not concern the main activities of the agency, but the fact
that it did work which in principle was the assigned sphere of the
FBI.

CHOMSKY: In part, yes. And look at the furor that has arisen over
the attempts at political assassination organized by the CIA. People
were shocked because the CIA tried to assassinate foreign leaders.
Certainly, that is very bad. But these were only abortive attempts; at
least in most cases -- in some it is not so clear. Consider in
comparison the Phoenix program in which the CIA was involved, which,
according to the Saigon government, exterminated forty thousand
civilians within two years. Why doesn't that count? Why are all these
people less significant than Castro or Schneider or Lumumba?

The official who was responsible for this, William Colby, who
headed the CIA, is now a respected columnist and lecturer on
university campuses. The same thing happened in Laos, though even
worse. How many peasants were killed as a result of CIA programs? And
who speaks of this? Nobody. No headlines.

It's always the same story. The crimes that are exposed are
significant, but they are trivial as compared to the really serious
criminal programs of the state, which are ignored or regarded as quite
legitimate.

QUESTION: How do you find all this information? If the newspapers
don't report it ...

CHOMSKY: This information is accessible, but only for fanatics: in
order to unearth it, you have to devote much of your life to the
search. In that sense, the information is accessible. But this
"accessibility" is hardly significant in practice. It is politically
more or less irrelevant. All the same, on the personal level, the
situation for someone like me is of course incomparably preferable in
the United States to the totalitarian societies. In the Soviet Union,
for example, someone who tried to do what I do here would probably be
in prison. It is interesting, and typical, that my political writings
critical of U.S. policies are never translated in the so-called
Communist countries, though they are, quite widely, in many other
parts of the world. But one must be cautious in assessing the
political significance of the relative freedom from repression -- at
least for the privileged -- in the United States. Exactly what does it
mean, concretely?

For example, last year I was invited to give a lecture at Harvard
before a group of journalists called the Nieman Fellows, who come
there each year from all over the United States and foreign countries
in order to further their education, so to speak. They asked me to
discuss Watergate and related topics -- the press generally was quite
proud of its courageous and principled behavior during the Watergate
period, for very little reason, as I've just tried to explain. Instead
of discussing Watergate, I spoke about the things to which I've just
alluded, because I wondered to what extent these journalists, who are
quite sophisticated and well informed compared to the general
population, might know about these matters. Well, none of them had any
idea of the scale of the FBI programs of repression, except for one
journalist from Chicago, who knew all about the Hampton affair. That
had indeed been discussed in detail in the Chicago press. If there had
been someone from San Diego in the group, he would have known about
the Secret Army Organization, and so forth ...

That is one of the keys to the whole thing. Everyone is led to
think that what he knows represents a local exception. But the overall
pattern remains hidden. Information is often given in the local
papers, but its general significance, the patterns on the national
level, remain obscured. That was the case during the entire Watergate
period, although the information appeared just at that time, in its
essentials, and with extensive documentation. And even since then the
discussion has rarely been analytic or anywhere near comprehensive,
and has not accounted for what happened in a satisfactory manner. What
you face here is a very effective kind of ideological control, because
one can remain under the impression that censorship does not exist,
and in a narrow technical sense that is correct. You will not be
imprisoned if you discover the facts, not even if you proclaim them
whenever you can. But the results remain much the same as if there
were real censorship. Social reality is generally concealed by the
intelligentsia. Of course, matters were quite different during the
period when there was an enormous popular anti-war and student
movement. Within the structure of popular movements there were many
possibilities for expressing views that departed from the narrow
limits of more or less "official" ideology, to which the
intelligentsia generally conform.

QUESTION: What was the reaction of Americans to the statements of
Solzhenitsyn?

CHOMSKY: Very interesting -- at least in the liberal press, which
is what primarily concerns me. Some criticized his extravagances. He
went well beyond what they could tolerate. For example, he called for
direct intervention by the United States in the USSR -- of a sort that
could very well lead to war and, far short of that, is likely to harm
the Russian dissidents themselves. Also, he denounced American
weakness in abandoning the struggle to subdue the Vietnamese
resistance, publicly opposed democratic reforms in Spain, supported a
journal that called for censorship in the United States, and so on.
Nonetheless, the press never ceased marveling at what an absolute
moral giant this man was. In our petty lives, we can barely imagine
such heights of moral grandeur.

In fact, the "moral level" of Solzhenitsyn is quite comparable to
that of many American Communists who have fought courageously for
civil liberties here in their own country, while at the same time
defending, or refusing to criticize, the purges and labor camps in the
Soviet Union. Sakharov is not as outlandish in his views as
Solzhenitsyn, certainly, but he too says that it was a great setback
for the West not to have pursued the Vietnam war to an American
victory. The United States did not act with sufficient resolution, and
delayed too long in sending a large expeditionary force, he complains.
Every fabrication of the U.S. propaganda apparatus is repeated, just
as American Communists who have struggled for civil rights here parrot
Russian propaganda. The easily documented fact of American aggression
in South Vietnam is not part of history, for example. One must admire
Sakharov's great courage and his fine work in defense of human rights
in the Soviet Union. But to refer to such people as "moral giants" is
quite remarkable.

Why do they do this? Because it is extremely important for
mainstream American intellectuals to make people believe that the
United States does not confront any real moral problems. Such problems
only arise in the Soviet Union, and the "moral giants" are there to
respond to them.

Compare Solzhenitsyn to many thousands of Vietnam war resisters and
deserters; many of them acted at a moral level that is incomparably
superior to his. Solzhenitsyn resolutely defends his own rights and
those of people like him -- which is certainly admirable. The
resisters and many deserters defended the rights of others -- namely,
the victims of American aggression and terror. Their actions were on a
much higher moral plane. Furthermore, their actions were not merely a
response to their own persecution; for the most part they undertook
these actions, which led to imprisonment or exile, of their own free
will, when they could have easily lived in comfort. Yet we read in the
American liberal journals that we can hardly conceive of the moral
grandeur of Solzhenitsyn in our society, and surely can find no one
like him. A very interesting pretense, with many implications.

It is quite generally claimed now that the American resistance had
as its cause the young men's fear of being drafted; that's a very
convenient belief for the intellectuals who confined themselves to
"pragmatic" opposition to the war. But it is an enormous lie. For most
of those who were in the resistance from its origins, nothing would
have been easier than to escape the draft, with its class bias, as
many others actually did. In fact, many of the activists already had
deferments. Many of the deserters too chose a difficult and painful
course for reasons of principle. But for those who supported the war
initially, and who only raised their whisper of protest when the costs
became too great, it is impossible to admit the existence of a
courageous and principled resistance, largely on the part of youth, to
the atrocities which they themselves had readily tolerated. The
mainstream of American liberalism does not wish to hear anything about
all that. It would raise too many embarrassing questions: What were
they doing when the war resisters were facing prison or exile? And so
on. So Solzhenitsyn comes to them as a gift of God, which permits them
to evade moral questions, "exporting them," so to speak, and to
conceal their own role as people who remained silent for so many
years, or finally objected on narrow and morally repugnant grounds of
cost and U.S. government interest.

Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced
the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks
aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin
of Uganda as a "racist murderer." The question is not whether Idi Amin
is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The
question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation
and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is
Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, and Ford -- that is to say, administrations that were
guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine
that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused
someone of being a racist murderer. This manner of shifting moral
issues to others is one of the ways to reconstruct the foundations of
moral legitimacy for the exercise of American power, shaken during the
Vietnam war. Solzhenitsyn is exploited to this end in a natural and
predictable way, though of course one cannot on those grounds draw any
conclusions in regard to his charges against the Soviet system of
oppression and violence.

Think of someone like Angela Davis: she defends the rights of
American blacks with great courage and conviction. At the same time
she refused to defend Czech dissidents or to criticize the Russian
invasion of Czechoslovakia. Is she regarded as a "moral giant"?
Hardly. Yet I believe she is superior to Solzhenitsyn on the moral
level. At least she did not reproach the Soviet Union for not having
conducted its atrocities with sufficient vigor.

CHOMSKY: Yes, that is in keeping with what I've just said about the
liberal press since the end of the war. The government has great need
now to restore its credibility, to make people forget history, and to
rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken
this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have
to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the
narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as
"stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost." Why? Because
soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps
other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams.

But this time, these will have to be successful interventions,
which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even
possible for the press to criticize successful interventions -- the
Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. -- as long as these criticisms don't
exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve
to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises,
and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of
U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to
liberal ideology.

How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that
sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of
the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would
have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus
a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad
policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant
officials. The war's savagery is also denounced; but that too is used
as a neutral category ... Presumably the goals were legitimate -- it
would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely ...

The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war -- on a pragmatic
basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs
according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity,
historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human
rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share
the same presuppositions as the hawks: they do not question the right
of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism
is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to
be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful
intervention is not brought into question.

Take a look at this editorial in the New York Times,
offering a retrospective analysis of the Vietnam war as it came to an
end. The editors feel that it is too early to draw conclusions about
the war:

Clio, the goddess of history, is cool and slow and elusive in her
ways.... Only later, much later, can history begin to make an
assessment of the mixture of good and evil, of wisdom and folly, of
ideals and illusions in the long Vietnam story.... There are those
Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist,
independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There
are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South
Vietnam was always a myth.... A decade of fierce polemics has failed
to resolve this ongoing quarrel.

Note that as the Times sets the spectrum of debate, the
position of much of the peace movement is simply excluded from
consideration. Not that it is wrong, but rather unthinkable,
inexpressible. As the Times sets the ground rules, the basic
premises of the state propaganda system are presupposed by all
participants in the debate: the American goal was to preserve an
"independent" South Vietnam -- perfect nonsense, as is easy to
demonstrate -- and the only question that arises is whether this
worthy goal was within our grasp or not. Even the more audacious
propaganda systems rarely go so far as to put forth state doctrine as
unquestionable dogma, so that criticism of it need not even be
rejected, but may simply be ignored.

Here we have a marvelous illustration of the functioning of
propaganda in a democracy. A totalitarian state simply enunciates
official doctrine -- clearly, explicitly. Internally, one can think
what one likes, but one can only express opposition at one's peril. In
a democratic system of propaganda no one is punished (in theory) for
objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What
this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought:
supporters of official doctrine at one end, and the critics --
vigorous, courageous, and much admired for their independence of
judgment -- at the other. The hawks and the doves. But we discover
that all share certain tacit assumptions, and that it is these
assumptions that are really crucial. No doubt a propaganda system is
more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted,
when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply
imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot
-- or suffer the consequences. The more vigorous the debate, the more
effectively the basic doctrines of the propaganda system, tacitly
assumed on all sides, are instilled. Hence the elaborate pretense that
the press is a critical dissenting force -- maybe even too critical
for the health of democracy -- when in fact it is almost entirely
subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this
case, the principle of the right of intervention, the unique right of
the United States to serve as global judge and executioner. It is
quite a marvelous system of indoctrination.

Here is still another example along the same lines. Look at this
quotation from the Washington Post, a paper that is often
regarded as the most consistent critic of the war among the national
media. This is from an editorial of April 30, 1975, entitled
"Deliverance":

For if much of the actual conduct of Vietnam policy over the
years was wrong and misguided -- even tragic -- it cannot be denied
that some part of the purpose of that policy was right and
defensible. Specifically, it was right to hope that the people of
South Vietnam would be able to decide on their own form of
government and social order. The American public is entitled, indeed
obligated, to explore how good impulses came to be transmuted into
bad policy, but we cannot afford to cast out all remembrance of that
earlier impulse.

What were the "good impulses"? When precisely did the United States
try to help the South Vietnamese choose their own form of government
and social order? As soon as such questions are posed, the absurdity
becomes evident. From the moment that the American-backed French
effort to destroy the major nationalist movement in Vietnam collapsed,
the United States was consciously and knowingly opposed to the
organized political forces within South Vietnam, and resorted to
increasing violence when these political forces could not be crushed.
But these facts, easily documented, must be suppressed. The liberal
press cannot question the ~basic doctrine of the state religion, that
the United States is benevolent, even though often misguided in its
innocence, that it labors to permit free choice, even though at times
some mistakes are committed in the exuberance of its programs of
international goodwill. We must believe that we "Americans" are always
good, though, to be sure, fallible:

For the fundamental "lesson" of Vietnam surely is not that we as
a people are intrinsically bad, but rather that we are capable of
error -- and on a gigantic scale....

Note the rhetoric: "we as a people" are not intrinsically bad, even
if we are capable of error. Was it "we as a people" who decided to
conduct the war in Vietnam? Or was it something that had rather more
to do with our political leaders and the social institutions they
serve? To pose such a question is of course illegitimate, according to
the dogmas of the state religion, because that raises the question of
the institutional sources of power, and such questions are only
considered by irrational extremists who must be excluded from debate
(we can raise such questions with regard to other societies, of
course, but not the United States).

It is not out of pessimism that I believe in the effectiveness of
such techniques of legitimation of U.S. interventions, as a basis for
future actions. One must not forget that while the U.S. government
suffered a setback in Vietnam, it succeeded only too well in
Indonesia, in Chile, in Brazil, and in many other places during the
same period.

The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates
-- indeed, encourages -- a variety of forms of opposition, such as
those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the
lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to
accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially
neutral category, not linked in any way to concrete social and
economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for
domination" to the employment of force by the United States government
in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to
ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible
to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations -- that is extremely
impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.

In the same way, the respectable members of the academic world must
ignore the substantial documentation concerning the principles that
guide U.S. foreign policy, and its concern to create a global economic
order that conforms to the needs of the U.S. economy and its masters.
I'm referring, for example, to the crucial documentation contained in
the Pentagon Papers, covering the late 1940s and early 1950s,
when the basic policies were clearly set, or the documents on global
planning for the postwar period produced in the early 1940s by the
War-Peace Studies groups of the Council on Foreign Relations, to
mention only two significant examples. Quite generally, the question
of the influence of corporations on foreign policy, or the economic
factors in policy formation, are reserved for the barest mention in a
footnote in respectable studies of the formation of policy, a fact
that has been occasionally studied, and is easily documented when
studied.

*Translator's note: Noam Chomsky has made
available the letter he and Professor Edward S. Herman sent to the
New York Times. I would like to take the opportunity to make this
letter public at this late date, both for its intrinsic interest and
to illustrate the limits imposed on public discussion in our leading
newspaper.

April 8, 1975

To the Editor
New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, N.Y. 10036

Dear Sir:

An editorial in the Times, April 5, observes that "a decade
of fierce polemics has failed to resolve this ongoing quarrel" between
two contending views: that "the war to preserve a non-Communist,
independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently," and that
"a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth." There has
also been a third position: That apart from its prospects for success,
the United States has neither the authority nor competence to
intervene in the internal affairs of Vietnam. This was the position of
much of the authentic peace movement, that is, those who opposed the
war because it was wrong, not merely because it was unsuccessful. It
is regrettable that this position is not even a contender in the
debate, as the Times sees it.

On a facing page, Donald Kirk observes that "since the term
'bloodbath' first came into vogue in the Indochinese conflict, no one
seems to have applied it to the war itself -- only to the possible
consequences of ending the war." He is quite wrong. Many Americans
involved in the authentic peace movement have insisted for years on
the elementary point that he believes has been noticed by "no one,"
and it is a commonplace in literature on the war. To mention just one
example, we have written a small book on the subject (Counterrevolutionary
Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda, 1973), though in this
case the corporation (Warner Brothers) that owned the publisher
refused to permit distribution after publication. But quite apart from
this, the observation has been made repeatedly in discussion and
literature on the war, by just that segment of opinion that the
Times editorial excludes from the debate.